No construction crew would ever build the first storey of a building without first laying the foundation. That’s why it was important to FINALCAD to design its digital experience the same way, by bolstering the customer experience with a support solution that provides a seamless customer experience.

FINALCAD leads the digitization of construction with mobile apps and advanced data analytics for the construction and infrastructure industry. Based in Paris, and with offices in Singapore and Tokyo, the company is changing the way people build by enabling real-time digital collaboration on projects and connecting the jobsite to the back office. Its apps allow site managers to perform inspections on their smartphones and architects to share digital models, including BIM. Meanwhile, building owners can monitor progress through advanced analytics and easy-to-read dashboards.

“Essentially, we bring business process to the field,” explained David Vauthrin, cofounder and chief marketing officer at FINALCAD.

From the company’s headquarters, a team of 35 support agents manage issues that range from setting up and managing a project to troubleshooting any in-app issues, like a set of plans that isn’t displaying properly. Considering that about 100 percent of FINALCAD’s customers are on mobile devices, the company is challenged with providing nearly immediate support for the issues and questions that arise in the field.

To that end, the Customer Success team, previously led by Vauthrin, offers 24 x 6 support. While most volume comes by phone or live chat, the team also handles an average monthly volume of 2,500 email tickets. Central to the team’s success and channel offerings is their multilingual help center, which allows customers to quickly help themselves. Furthermore, FINALCAD uses the Zendesk Mobile SDK to create a mobile-optimized help center experience within the FINALCAD apps.

FINALCAD’s ability to enable its customers to self-serve across languages and locales is key to its strategy for providing great support. FINALCAD’s app is available in 30 languages and the company has already completed projects in 25 countries. And although the team sits within an industry that Vauthrin, citing a McKinsey study, estimates is 20 years behind the paperless revolution, FINALCAD’s customer base is nonetheless showing signs of evolution. The company is growing close to $100 million in annual revenue.

FINALCAD selected Zendesk back in 2012 after evaluating Zendesk Support, Desk.com, and Help Scout. Zendesk Support’s extensibility and multi-language features and capabilities won over Vauthrin and the team. After getting started with email support, FINALCAD adopted Zendesk Guide in 2015 and built out its help center, which contains help articles in 10 of the 30 languages supported by the customer service team.

Before Guide, the team tracked help content in Google docs—an option Vauthrin said the team could never return to. Now, instead, the team creates help content using the Knowledge Capture app, a free Guide add-on, to enable the rollout of a knowledge-centered support model that scales with the business. In the course of just six months, the team’s article count grew from 10 articles to more than 100, just by taking answers to frequently asked questions in email tickets and publishing them for the wider team to use.

“Previously, it fell to agents to search our existing articles to determine if there was one they could use, or whether they needed to create a new one,” Vauthrin says. “Now that we have the Knowledge Capture app installed, we have been able to increase productivity and improve article quality by automating a formerly manual and inefficient process.”

In fact, agents are now able to answer up to 10x as quickly as they were before. To measure self-service success, the team tracks the number of customers they are able to serve per agent on the team. “Guide helped us maintain the same headcount on our team while tripling our user base,” Vauthrin says. “So, it’s tripling our efficiency and providing massive productivity improvement.”

An added benefit is that the team’s help content is also making onboarding new team members more efficient. Agents typically train for between a week and three months, depending on their tier of support, but since the team’s collective knowledge is increasingly captured in the Knowledge Capture app, agents can find information faster, and from a central source.

The work the team has put in to the customer experience has paid off. Since 2016, FINALCAD’s customer service team has boasted a near-perfect adherence to their matrix of SLAs, based on customer maturity. “We try to over-deliver. We always have to ensure the customer has an awesome experience with us,” Vauthrin said.

The success FINALCAD has seen with Zendesk Support and Guide has led them to start the process of moving to an integrated Zendesk omnichannel solution that will include Zendesk Talk and Zendesk Chat. Live chat and phone support are channels FINALCAD has offered through siloed tools—including a traditional phone line and using Intercom for chat—but, as Vauthrin explained, “It makes sense to stay with Zendesk’s family of products considering the team’s success with its initial two offerings.”

Taking an omnichannel approach in 2017 and beyond means bringing FINALCAD customers a truly seamless support experience. Approximately 50 percent of the team’s volume comes in by phone and an integrated solution will allow the team to track and log calls for the first time.

“When you have site people on the field, with their helmets and boots on, in the mud, their first reaction is to call,” Vauthrin said. “So by embedding Zendesk Talk into Support, we can track the call activity.”

Once the suite of channels is fully implemented, the team is looking toward a lofty goal: making their SLAs even more stringent. Vauthrin says he’d like every contact to get a response in under couple of minutes.

Other efficiencies and customizations to FINALCAD’s rollout of Zendesk include out-of-the-box integrations with JIRA and Salesforce. They’ve also installed apps from the Zendesk Apps Marketplace including Tasks, Clone Ticket, and Tables—all further supporting the team by providing cross-functional data and capabilities around software bugs, sales, and more.

“It was so great to go on Zendesk, with all the personalization and workflows we can bring to the process, and with awesome Zendesk mobile apps. We’re super happy with Zendesk,” Vauthrin said.

“Zendesk allows us better mastery of customer service and to execute on a global vision. With global oversight, we know exactly what our priorities are and can identify and remedy any friction points for our customers.”